Dr. Marvin Wachman (1917-2007) was a great advocate for educating young people. In a distinguished academic career, he served as president of both Temple University and Lincoln University and led the Foreign Policy Research Institute as president from 1983 to 1989. Throughout his life, he remained a passionate believer that “you never stop learning.”
Established in 1990, the Wachman Center is dedicated to improving international and civic literacy for high school teachers and high school students.

December 2016 marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Soviet Russia. Both dates give reason to reexamine the history of Eurasia, a vast region with many ethnic groups and multiple religions, at times united under authoritarian governments, at other times divided between dozens of countries.

The Use and Abuse of Drones: A Debate

Although the U.S. has been the world’s pre-eminent user of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones, our technological advantage is eroding as drone technology spreads across the world, with some 80 countries now building active drone programs. This new arms race in drones is sure to have important strategic consequences both in surveillance as well as war and raises important questions about the use of drones by the U.S. and others. Our guests will debate U.S. reliance on drones, the ethics of targeted killings, and the future roles of autonomous systems.

Michael Boyle is an Associate Professor of Political Science at La Salle University in Philadelphia and a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book is Violence after War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014).

Michael Horowitz is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the associate director of Penn’s Perry World House, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His research focuses primarily on international conflict and military innovation by state and non-state actors.

Our moderator Michael Noonan is the Director of Research, and is the Director of the Program on National Security, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His current research focuses on civil-military relations, indirect approaches and strategy (particularly as they relate to political and irregular warfare), the roles and missions of the U.S. military, and transnational foreign fighters.

Related program(s)

Related event(s)

The Foreign Policy Research Institute, founded in 1955, is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests. In the tradition of our founder, Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé, Philadelphia-based FPRI embraces history and geography to illuminate foreign policy challenges facing the United States. More about FPRI »